Post navigation

About philipganderton

Spinning tops have been around for thousands of years, and wooden spinning tops are pretty standard fare among children’s toys, even today.
This week I started selling the wood spinning tops I’ve been making. Having bought a wood lathe and been making spin bowls, I didn’t think I would want to make tops, but now that’s all I want to make! And it’s been a blast. The top shown below is a hybrid of wood dowels, poplar and oak, set in a black acrylic resin. I call it my flower top.

This short piece appeared in Ramblings magazine, published by the Roadrunner region of the Porsche Club of America:

This isn’t really a story about Porsches, it’s a story about friendship. Owning a Porsche has brought me many new friends. Everyone has friends, some better than others, and some closer than others. Some friends we love, some we respect, some we admire, and some we might even envy.

I have a “formula” that describes friendship. That might sound weird, because most people probably don’t think that hard about their friends, they just accept them, without question. But I’ve had many friends in my 59 years, and they’ve come and they’ve gone. Some I remember, and some I miss. There’s too many to count, and most aren’t in my life any more. I am blessed with a very wonderful group of friends at the moment thanks to my interest in cars, and my membership of the local Porsche Club of America. Which is why I’m writing this.

Here’s my friendship formula. Friendship is one part the past, one part the present, and one part the future.

Regarding the past, I like to talk with friends about the things I’ve done with them. The “Remember when we…”, or “…and what about that time you…” Memories made with friends provide the foundation of a friendship, on which it continues to be built.

The time spent with friends right here and now is the experience of friendship. It’s real, and happening, and should be enjoyed for its immediate value. As humans stuck living life linearly, as each next minute becomes the last minute, the only thing we can really count on is the present. And if I have a choice about who I have to spend it with, I’d rather it be with friends. Making good use of the time you spend with friends ensures you are reinforcing the foundations of your friendships. You have to be present and engaged with your friends to enjoy them the most.

The third part of friendship is the prospect of future shared moments. We must look to the future because that’s where our next minute, day, and year, lives. We all have hopes and wishes. It’s natural to look forward to spending time with friends. A great friendship is one that leaves you a little sad each time you part, and wanting to spend more time with that person, or those people. Friendship is about anticipation, as much what’s happening now, or what happened before.

All these elements of friendship were on display on a recent Club drive out. While much pleasure came from driving our wonderful Porsche cars on back country roads, when people got out of their cars for lunch, or a pit stop to refuel, the conversation was a mix of recollection and shared experience. Conversations ranged from comparisons of car handling to complaints about rocks in the road and cows on the shoulders. At the end of the Tour, as we headed on our last leg home, everyone looked forward to the next Tour, and the next experience, and the next memory.

Hanna Arendt, born 1906 and died 1975, was a German-born Jewish American political theorist. In a 1974 interview she said the following regarding the power of lies:

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

It’s a chilling insight into Donald Trump’s strategy of attacking the media, including his recent pronouncement via Twitter. Trump’s use of Twitter to “reach his supporters” is characteristic of Arendt’s idea of constantly changing lies.

In the January 30, 2017 edition of the New Yorker, write Philip Roth says this:

“I was born in 1933,” he continued, “the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I’ve been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”